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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

It's so site specific, and people make stringent statements based upon their location.

It's not clever, or being insightful, or forward thinking, if it makes no sense.

Try getting groceries on a bike, at -40C and with ice and snow everywhere. Now try it as an octogenarian, or even as a 40 year old in those conditions.

Come on!

People need transportation 12 months a year, not 4 of them! A bike is absolutely, positively not a car replacement in many places, at all, ever, period.

My statment may seem harsh, but I keep seeing all these suggestions which show people only thinking of where they live.

Oh and the hilarious counter suggestion I've heard sometimes. "Don't live there then". What? OK, abandon Canada, and its ability to feed the world with wheat, rye, meat in its summer. Good call, that.

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People are going to have to come to a point where they realize that their ridiculous libertarian fantasy of living to old age in a cabin surrounded by glaciers ten miles from anyone else is never going to work. There is no transportation solution to poor land use planning. The fact that this particular fantasy can't work is not an indictment of the bicycle, it is an indictment of the fantasy.

Civilized people live in little clumps called villages, towns, or cities, where the transportation problem is amortized by bringing essential goods such as food by truck to the center of the village where it is within walking distance of even the octogenarians.

I recently got so fed up with the meme that most people live far from other people that I made this visualization of where people live in California. The territory-weighted view of life is completely defective. The overwhelming majority of people live near other people. That some people live far from other people is not important for general commentary or policy. Those few people can do what they like and it's just not important enough to discuss. https://observablehq.com/@jwb/californians-from-oregon-to-me...

California's population is about the same size of Canada's, a country larger than the entire US.

While many people do live in cities, many live in, and outside cities, in rural areas.

Rural areas which support the farms you seem to like. Farms do not live in a vaccuum, and require an entire infrastructure of people working, and living in these areas, including schools, etc.

But outside of this, I noticed you completely glossed over climate as an issue, ignoring inclement weather for most of the year. Your map of warm California is irrelevant here, and does not discuss this.

Canada has very excellent urban planning, and often has grocery stores near by. That only helps at certain times of years, and only helps in dense areas.

This is part of the problem.

Electric cars are an awesome solution, yet what I see always is hard core environmentalists harming positive change. An electric car is far, far better than gas, yea? Is it?

Then holy hell, just drop the blather and embrace it, and be happy change is happening.

Get behind the positive.

We have vegetarians manipulating the climate crisis to get their way (no beef is not bad for the environment), we have the bike/anti-car side doing the same.

You want truth? Here's truth, and you saw it with all the covid political stupidity.

Push too far, and it backfires...

> Push too far, and it backfires...

Ah yes, it always ends in the implicit threat of violence with people like you. Look what you made me do!

Good grief. Reality is reality. And you mentioned violence, not I.

Push back can be an election which reverse years of progress. How do you think Trump got elected?! Pushback.

You want more of that?!? The US left and right... nutjobs one and all!

I kinda feel like cars are a pretty good transportation solution to poor land use planning.

People are going to have to come to a point where they realize that their urban fantasies that everyone wants to live stacked on top of other people just so they will be within walking distance of grocery stores is never going to happen.

They also have to realize that not everyone wants corporate box box stores in their backyards, which in the US is where grocery and household goods are bought.

They also should realize that sometimes desirable places to live can grow faster than infrastructure planning anticipated and nice things like bicycle paths and central shopping areas often aren’t often available that allow safe travel from where the homes are…to where the grocery stores are located by anything other than a care.

> They also have to realize that not everyone wants corporate box box stores in their backyards

Corporate box stores are literally a direct result of suburbanization, if you don’t like them then that’s a argument against the suburbs, not for them.

I wasn’t arguing against them, I was suggesting that folks generally don’t want a 250k sq foot building operating 24 hours a day on a 7 acre patch right outside the back door.

That tends to be why developers avoid putting housing developments right beside them, it’s not really unreasonable IMO.

I get that, its just confusing why you’d connect that with urbanization. Urban environments tend not to have corporate megastores.

Your comment read to me like this “not everyone likes urban environments, people don’t want [insert thing indicative of the suburbs] right on top of them”

Urban places aren’t just more compact versions of the suburbs.

I was not clear then. I was basically taking exception to the comment above that seemed to grip about the lack of walkability of suburban and rural communities and how they were not optimal communities. Some folks just don’t want urban (I don’t). Some folks want suburban (I do) and some folks want rural (not for me).

Suburban tends to be not generally walkable because grocery and retail tend to be on the outskirts and not city center. My comment about big box stores was meant to basically convey that they are not walkable or bicycle friendly because folks in suburban environments don’t want those giant stores that near their homes, but they don’t mind and actually prefer them to be 5-10 by car.

Some neighborhood developers drop quasi downtown main streets now with a few restaurants, boutique shops,etc…but these are not designed to sustain the community around it, but more as a neighborhood perk. Generally are nice enough that nearby homes are not devalued by close proximity the way a large retail or grocery store might be.

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